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Dr. Seuss is on the loose again in new collection

From the literary lost and found – like the ones in the back of elementary school classrooms – come four "new" illustrated stories by Dr. Seuss that will be published for the first time collected in a book.

From the literary lost and found – like the ones in the back of elementary school classrooms – come four "new" illustrated stories by Dr. Seuss that will be published for the first time collected in a book.

Horton and the Kwuggerbug and Other Lost Stories, to be released by Random House on Sept. 9, contains tales originally published in Redbookmagazine between 1950 and 1955, then largely forgotten.

Seuss, christened Theodor Seuss Geisel, died in 1991 at the age of 87. (He took on the Dr. title as a joke about the doctorate in literature he abandoned to spend more time doodling.)

He wrote and illustrated 43 books for kids (The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham) that changed the way we think about children's literature. He championed what he called "logical insanity," by imbedding morals into silly rhymes as he made learning to read fun. Seuss's ever-popular book for grads, Oh, the Places You'll Go!, was No. 3 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list as recently as May 29.

Charles D. Cohen, a scholar and collector of all-things Seussian, tracked down copies of the magazines that published Seuss. "For the most part, those magazines were tossed out when the next month's issue arrived and the stories were largely forgotten," Cohen writes in an introduction to the new collection.

He call the four stories "fresh encounters with old friends and familiar places."

"Horton and the Kwuggerbug" stars Seuss' faithful elephant who confronts a crafty and manipulative insect.

"Marco Comes Late" explains why Marco, the imaginative kid in Seuss's first kids' book, And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), is late for school.

"How Officer Pat Saved the Whole Town" is set on Mulberry Street and stars a vigilant police officer.

"The Hoobub and the Grinch" features another Grinch - not the one who stole Christmas in Seuss's 1957 book - but one that similarly believes, as Cohen puts it, "that everyone is a mindless consumer who can be manipulated." (Seuss would know: he worked in advertising.)

Cohen, 53, a dentist in South Deerfield, Mass. -- what would Seuss make of that? -- also wrote the introduction to an earlier collection of seven magazine stories: The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories in 2011.